Competency development in the balanced approach emphasizes the need for a broader concern with maturational development, especially by means of acquiring the survival skills required for daily living (p. 485).
Interventions that emphasized the balanced approach do look at the deficits and dysfunctions of the individual, but also identify family and community strengths, to draw upon. Not only would this intervention increase competency in the delinquent youth, but also help ensure public safety. Mentoring with a parental education and community organization approach, coupled with an effective sanctioning guidelines with meaningful consequences, is one intervention that would fulfill this criteria.
This type of intervention differs significantly from the interventions commonly utilized in the current system. Most interventions are geared to address a singular facet of delinquency, and regretfully ignore the others. As an example, the Boys and Girls Clubs of America offer a wide variety of programs to help counter risk factors for youth delinquency. Their programs such as: Goals for Graduation, Project Learn, and Strategic Approaches for Academic Success all look to the educational component of risk factors for delinquency ("Education," 2009). Programs such as reading remediation, as supported by Christine and Yell (2008), are types of programs that are typically either preventative in nature, or rehabilitative, yet they're not well-rounded enough to address all of the issues that make up the challenge of youth delinquency.
A report by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (2007) noted that sanctioning too in today's world is ineffective and does not "provide meaningful consequences for offense behavior, and has failed to effectively address public safety goals" (p. 9). The report further continued that because of limits inherent to the mission of individual treatment, the goal of rehabilitation is largely unsuccessful....
For this reason, many states have focused their efforts on sanctioning, giving rehabilitation a much lower priority. Even when combined, incarceration, surveillance, and other punitive strategies coupled with rehabilitative treatment strategies like therapy still are not an effective means of intervention.
Each of these commonly utilized intervention programs show the same fatal flaw. The all have the inability to address the multitude of factors that lead to and promote recurring youth delinquency. Although one or even two facets of the problem are being addressed in these traditional methods, the risk factors that go unaddressed lead to the general failing. Those children who already had protective factors in the unaddressed areas are primarily the ones who succeed in the more one-dimensional programs currently used. As a result, many youths return to delinquent behaviors.
References
Education and career. (2009). Retrieved April 20, 2009, from http://www.bgca.org/programs/education.asp.
Ek, A. (Mar 2008). Cluster profiles of youths living in urban poverty: Factors affecting risk and resilience. Social Work Research, 32(1). Retrieved April 20, 2009, from CINAHL Plus database.
Leve, L. & Chamberlain, P. (Jun 2005). Association with delinquent peers: Intervention effects for youth in the juvenile justice system. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 33(3). Retrieved April 20, 2009, from PubMed Central database.
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. (Aug 1997). Balanced and restorative justice for juveniles. Retrieved April 20, 2009, from http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/framwork.pdf.
Risk and protective factors for youth violence fact sheet. (20 Dec 2007). Retrieved April 20, 2009, from http://www.safeyouth.org/scripts/facts/risk.asp.
Roberts, A. (2004). Juvenile justice sourcebook: Past, present and future. Oxford University Press: New York.
